remaining in these islands-Goidelic and Brythonic. They are at least as interesting as Greek, Latin, and Sanscrit, and far more so than Hebrew. In their structure and vocabulary is locked up a great amount of useful 'prehistoric' history; these languages representing in varying degrees the combination in vocabulary and syntax between the Aryan speech of the invading Kelts and the probably antecedent Iberian language. (This last may have been connected with the Berber group of North Africa, or with Basque, which was spoken in France and Spain by the pre-existing peoples who were conquered by the Gallic Kelts.)

By reason of this neglect on the part of men of science, modern Irish, Gaelic, and Welsh have become transcribed and spelt in the most ridiculous and barbaric fashion, with far less reason in the use of the Roman letters than is even the case with modern English.8

Anthropological researches on the lines of statements recently published by Dr. Frank Shrubsall (of the Hospital for Consumption, Brompton Road) would show the results of town life under present conditions on this or that racial element in the British population: how, for example, tall blonds are best suited to a life in the country, while brunets are better adapted to resist the bacteria of towns. While in the last ten years or so anthropology has been turned to practical uses in most parts of the civilised countries in the matter of identification by finger-prints, it is also coming into play in regard to the State-care for the children, the checking of certain diseases in early youth which by neglect might permanently enfeeble the individual.

Naturally Medicine and Surgery have long been associated with Anthropology. So far as Comparative Anatomy exists in these islands, it may perhaps be said to have been founded by the great John Hunter, whose collections of comparative and human anatomy are permanently established in the remarkable museum of the Royal College of Surgeons in Lincoln's Inn.

8

This is the only museum, at present, that exists in the British Isles which deals effectively with the exposition of the anatomy of man, and in which it is possible for the student correctly to compare human anatomy with that of other mammals or other vertebrates. Nearly It must be admitted that the Irish, Highlanders, and Welsh have apparently gloried in this obscurantism, and in these uncouth transliterations of languages which are by no means difficult of pronunciation to any Englishman who is capable of talking another language than his own. A Government movement should be set on foot to establish authoritatively the standard pronunciation and phonetic spelling of Irish and Welsh, just as, for example, the Spanish Academy in the eighteenth century set to work to obtain and establish in a most sensible and logical fashion the correct phonetic spelling of Castilian. The modern Irish alphabet and orthography, due to monkish invention about thirteen hundred years ago, are rabid nonsense; equally unnecessary and absurd is the spelling of Welsh with y's, w's. ll's, dd's, ff's, &c., &c. The correct phonetics of these tongues should be ascertained by a select commission, who should forthwith establish a simple logical spelling in the Roman alphabet as laid down by Lepsius. These remarkable Keltic languages should then be taught throughout the United Kingdom as a branch of history.

a century of thanks is due by the British public to the College of Surgeons of Great Britain for their gratuitous assistance to the study of anthropology and of comparative anatomy in general by the institution and maintenance of this magnificent museum, the germ of which was the Hunter collection.

So far as public exhibits and displayed information are concerned, we are very much in arrears on the score of anthropology (the study of man as a mammal) compared with the museums of France, Germany, Belgium, Russia, and Austria-Hungary. Ethnographically, perhaps, we stand well, with our magnificent collections in the British Museum, though therein is all too little space for the adequate display of those collections which illustrate the primitive culture of the still-existing races of savage men or the gorgeous developments in art of the Caucasian and Mongolian peoples. The collections are there, the skill and zeal in exhibiting them in an educating way are decidedly present in a staff of exceptional ability ; but the nation, as represented by the Treasury, still finds itself unable to meet the cost of further exhibition-rooms.9

But as regards the other side of the question-Man—above all, British man-considered physically: our efforts are most inadequate. Putting aside the private help afforded to students by the College of Surgeons, all that we know of Man as a mammal at the British Museum (Natural History) is crammed into a small portion of one of the uppermost galleries, up (I cannot remember how many) flights of fatiguing stairs. The greater part of this gallery is of necessity devoted to the exposition of apes, monkeys, lemurs, and bats. What remains is given up to cases containing a valuable collection of skulls (imperfectly exhibited for want of space), a few skeletons and bones, a placard refuting palmistry by an appeal to the gorilla's foot, and a not particularly good collection of photographs of certain savage tribes. As to the types of the British Isles, they are conspicuous by their absence. Go to France, Russia, Germany, Belgium, and Austria-Hungary, and in the public museums you will find magnificent collections of photographs (or life-sized models) of all the physical types of men and women in those countries, giving you some idea of the race or races to be found therein. Nothing of the kind that I know of exists in the British Isles, and all published works on anthropology avoid the subject, and reduce British anthropology to a few paltry paragraphs, illustrated by one or two picture-postcard photographs of fishermen or Welsh cottagers, wearing

⚫ A British anthropologist, to whom I showed this article, writes in regard to this paragraph: 'Berlin, with 500,000 objects and 6000l. a year for purchases, beats the British Museum hollow; Dresden has nearly as much stuff, I should think. Hamburg, Cologne, and Leipzig are perhaps smaller, but with grants of 1000l. a year and upwards for purchases they will be dangerous rivals in the very near future. Do you know that France has now actually started an Anthropological Bureau for Government information?' We may rejoice in German emulation in such a good cause without slackening our own efforts.

stage costumes, together with some monstrously faked sickly-sweet ' types of English beauty' (in some cases amiable ladies of the stage whose birthplace was on the Continent of Europe).

But after attending in an adequate degree to the illustration of the Anthropology of the United Kingdom, the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland-if it were only properly supported and subscribed to by the nation as a whole-might get into touch with the educational establishments of the Daughter Nations, of the Crown Colonies or Protectorates, or of India. It would incite where they do not already exist (and this is hardly anywhere) the establishment of Anthropological societies or departments in all the great centres of population throughout the British Empire.

It would induce a desire to create an Anthropological society at Malta to describe the wonderful past and to delineate the present racial character of that most interesting and intelligent people the Maltese, whose language, like Irish and Welsh, locks up so much unwritten history. It-the parent Anthropological Institute of Great Britain-should urge on a much-needed anthropological survey of the British West African Colonies and Protectorates; of the Falkland Islands, where a new and interesting type of white man is being slowly developed; of Cyprus, where there are several layers of Mediterranean races; but above all of South Africa. Seeing that we have been the ruling power in the South African sub-continent for over a hundred years, it is little less than a national disgrace that we have made such poor use of our opportunity for enriching the knowledge of the world in regard to the past and present negro peoples of South Africa.

So far as Government action is concerned, there is scarcely anything to record. Fortunately there was once a Governor of Cape Colony with a strong love for science, Sir George Grey. Under his instigation Livingstone and Dr. W. I. Bleek collected much information as to perishing tribes-Bushman, Hottentot, and Bantu.

The Colonial Government established-and still maintain a small fund wherewith to maintain a librarian and a museum curator at Cape Town, but in the National Library of Cape Town are still preserved in manuscript most of the important anthropological and ethnological studies of Livingstone, Bleek and others, which this great Colony has either been too poor or too uninterested to publish.

There are in pigeon-holes somewhere the very valuable Reports of Mr. Palgrave, the Commissioner sent in the early 'seventies to examine Damaraland (the anthropological photographs obtained on this expedition-most creditable to Mr. Palgrave, considering the epoch in which he worked-are in the collection of the Royal Geographical Society).

So far no great Afrikander has arisen who has displayed any scientific aptitude for the study of the Negro races of South Africa. Almost all the recorded work has been done by outsiders-British, German,

French, Swiss, and Norwegians. Yet what links in the chain of evidence of the evolution of humanity as a whole or of branches of the Negro species in particular are concealed in this southern prolongation of the Dark Continent!

The little research stimulated and paid for by the Cape of Good Hope Government has revealed the remains of a vanished racethe Strand-loopers-who are probably akin to the Bushmen, but of a less specialised and more primitive type.

Is there any truth in Professor Keane's account 1o of the Vaal-pens or 'Ashy-bellies,' based on the stories of travellers and writers who assert them to be a very primitive race still lingering in the Northern Transvaal, and perhaps descended from the aforesaid Strand-loopers ; whilst other authorities, like Mr. F. C. Selous, deny their existence, or at any rate account for them as some starved remnant of an outcast Bushman or Bantu stock?

Private British enterprise, even on the part of people of very small means, has certainly done something to illustrate and elucidate the manners and customs of the South African Bantu races. We owe much recent information under this head to the writings of Mr. Dudley Kidd and Miss A. Werner, to a number of missionaries of the London Missionary Society, the Scottish missionaries of Nyasaland, the Rev. Father Torrend of the Zambezi, the Universities Mission, and to the Anglican bishops of South-Eastern Africa; but comparatively with the importance of the place that Trans-Zambesian Africa holds in the scheme of the British Empire, our knowledge of the anthropology and ethnology, and even the languages, of its five or six millions of negroes is pitifully small. The Government of Cape Colony has done something for which it should receive due credit; the other Governments have done practically nothing, and the Imperial Government has been the most indifferent of all. A good deal of what we do know has been derived from the results of explorations subsidised by the Governments of France and Germany.

Where in the whole range of British South African literature can we find such a work as that of Professor Leonhard Schultze, Aus Namaland und Kalahari? It is practically a description of man and nature the anthropology, above all-in the N.W. parts of Cape Colony, subsidised by the German Government.

Crossing the Zambezi northwards, look at the way in which the German Government has enabled Dr. Fülleborn and others to illustrate the anthropology of German East Africa and Nyasaland, and consider what impetus or assistance the Imperial Government has shown in dealing with the anthropology, the native codes of law, the languages,

"Popular anthropology--I mean anthropology popularised owes much to the labours and researches of Professor A. H. Keane and (more recently) of Mr. T. AtholJoyce, of the British Museum, and Mr. Northcote Thomas; also to the publishing enterprise of Messrs. Hutchinson, Macmillan, Cassell, and Archibald Constable.

myths, traditions, institutions of British Central Africa, British East Africa, or Uganda. Such work as has been done by British pens has been for the most part carried out by missionaries, or by Government officials at their own expense, or by travellers and explorers not always of British nationality.

Our own Government is quite willing, if necessary, to spend millions on warfare in Africa and (very properly) millions on railway construction; but it has not held up a finger of encouragement or provided a pound to lay the foundation of a sound study of the anthropology of regions wherein-even more than in South Africait is necessary for the administrative white man to know most thoroughly the minds and bodily characteristics of the Negro and Negroid races with whom he has to deal.

Private enterprise just enables the Royal Institute of Anthropology to keep alive. A Government grant of 500l. a year from out of the brimming revenue of the United Kingdom would place it above all risk of the bailiffs being put some day into its one-pair back at No. 3 Hanover Square; would enable it with a lighter heart to extend its researches and its practical instructions to those about to travel.

Private enterprise has likewise started and kept going the Royal Asiatic Society (but this, I believe, receives a small grant from the India Office), the Central Asian Society, the African Society; and there may be for aught I know a Chinese Society; there ought certainly to be one dealing with the Malay races of our vast Malay possessions. The Royal Asiatic Society outdistances all these other bodies by the length of its existence. Its journal, in many volumes, contains a splendid accumulation of Eastern lore. Unfortunately this is caviare to the general mind; some Harmsworth, some Saleeby, some Hooper is required to come along some day and-with due permission and participation of profits-boil down the researches of the Royal Asiatic Societies of London, Calcutta, and Bombay into palatable ethnology, and thus get them consumed, digested, and assimilated by the British public.

It has been of late the fashion to scoff at the efforts of the Times or of Carmelite Buildings to invigorate knowledge by hypnotising the British public into the purchase of encyclopædias, histories, and self-educators. In my own humble opinion, these agencies have by such means increased the general education of the upper and middle classes by at least one-fifth. The ninth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica may or may not have been slightly out of date for the fine fleur of intellect of the year 1900, but it was quite new enough knowledge and sound enough for nine-tenths of the population to whom it had been more or less inaccessible.

In the same way-if I may venture to offer an opinion of my own-one would like to see some such publishers as those mentioned compel the British public to take in a great work on anthropology